Look out! Communists are coming for your toothbrush. Better vote for harsher penalties for modifying stuff you bought. The DMCA still allows throwing away or disconnecting the computer locking you out of your heated seats.

Yes, many much easier ways. A propane tank for one. Wet, high CO2 methane is really hard to make explode.

Do get a CO detector though.

You can buy gas from anyone. Even make your own in a digester.

Your gas stove is not cryptographically locked to one gas company.

Spain and china managed just fine. Rail costs way less than 20 lane highways.

If you want round trip efficiency higher than 30% you need prohibitive quantities of platinum and iridium (with some promising research to maybe replace the iridium with cobalt, making fuel cells about as sustainable as NMC batteries).

Storing it is also generally prohibitive. Small high pressure vessels have a hard expiry date shorter thna the expected life of a battery, take up more space and cost as much as LFP batteries. By the time you add a fuel cell stack and buffer battery there’s not really any weight saving either.

Geologic storage is an option, but use cases are limited. Large scale stationary tank storage is also a possibility for industrial chemical use.

Hydrogen hype is largely a greenwashing and delay tactic by the oil and gas industry.

PV energy in low cloud areas is <2c/kWh and dropping 7-10% p.a (a recent UAE ppa was 1.6c).

Crude oil is presently ~4c/kWh and frequently 6c. Distillates are often over $1/L before taxes or 10c/kWh.

20% one-way energy efficiency competes with oil. If the catalyst stack is significantly cheaper than water electrolysers it can use curtailed renewables and compete with oil at <10%.

Won’t replace batteries or electrification, but a solid choice for emergency storage or high capital, low-use assets (like a forklift that gets used twice a week or a bbq).

>50% efficiency would displace fossil gas with sufficiently cheap catalyst stack.

You’d have thought it was obvious, but everyone I’ve ever met IRL thought they’d be cheaper forever.

Worse than that. It’s more along the lines of asserting that they are happy with the financial arrangement and “jokes” as per the status quo, and that they stand by him and his decision to advertise their product for money on the “apoplogy” video. They’re making fun of the ones raising the issues, not linus. Even further they’re trying to milk to controversy for attention.

This is them condoning the behavior and showing their support for the channel in their weird cringey way. Not a condemnation.

Her response was unable to do nearly as much damage as the article. The stakes were much lower for the vice editor and her platform had much lower reach.

Researchers at weapons facility achieve 2MJ of heat for a cost of tens of MJ of electricity and chemical energy to power single-shot laser fired at target that took at least gigajoules to produce for method that will never have any relevance to energy generation.

But they pinky swear that at some point they might think about electricity so keep giving them a big chunk of the civialian energy budget.

I’m not sure if the time scale would be measurable. Nanoseconds at most. But the relevant part is that it’s ignition.

A device to harness inertial confinement fusion would work very very differently to a magnetic confinement one if that were the goal here (it’s not, it’s a weapons research facility). Essentially heating something up a lot in milliseconds and then extracting the heat over hours to months.

This research comes frim the llnl weapons complex: https://wci.llnl.gov/

There is an international treaty against nuclear arms testing, so as new weapons and platforms are developed there is no way to expose them to the conditiona they’d encounter if they actually had to deploy nuclear weapons (or operate in an environment where they are being used such as trying to take out the other bomber that is on its way to destroy your other city while the first city burns).

In addition to the enormous military budget, They take large quantities of civilian money via the DOE because they pay lip service to it being “energy research”. This is the part that is objectionable.

It’s a cool thing, and arguably necessary given we recently got to see what happens when a country bordering Russia gives up its nuclear weapons altogether, but there is little application for energy. It may also see the development of some micro-fusion warhead with no fission component which is technically a nuclear bomb, but nigh-impossible to make if you don’t have the US military budget so they’ll use it anyway and say “nuh-huh!” when anyone objects.

Either the technology is highly limited in the volume where the reaction is self sustaining, so the machine as a whole will never break even energy-wise, or it is not, and every inertial confinement generator produced is essentially a weapon of mass destruction that the US will never let exist outside of the control of nuclear armed countries.

There may be some limited application to energy, but it’s a stretch (essentially it would look like asking the US military nicely to come set another bomb off in your artificial geothermal reservoir every few months). It will certainly never be deployed in a non-military mobile application (which rules out most of the use cases where renewables are not strictly superior).

https://www.jinkosolar.com/en/

Except this one isn’t basic physics research. It’s an end run around nuclear weapons treaties to test how missiles and planes respond to H-bombs going off nearby.

It could have an energy application (maybe), but given that the targets are ludicrously expensive, the most viable power plant would resemble the attempts in the 60s to use bombs in underground caverns to heat things up and put essentially a geothermal plant on top. Except with a laser detonator rather than a fission one. Chances of making it economically viable or reliable are slim.

The amount of energy you can get per m^2 without heating the planet is definitionally the amount you can get by covering a small fraction of the planet with PV. No thermal power generation can beat this.

Large, inflexible, overly centralised generation is also unable to reach high grid penetration (for example france produces 20-30% of their load from dispatchable sources like gas and hydro even on a summer’s night during the pandemic where demand is <50% of their nuclear fleet’s nameplate capacity)

Assuming for a moment it is real and works and this class of material is useful for transmitting current with 0 resistance or making magnets, many attributes of other ceramic superconductors also shouldn’t apply given the theory that predicted it says it’s not one of those either.

This also leads to a very very stupid reactionary semantic argument you’ll start seeing more and more over the coming weeks.

Bite the bullet. Move to slightly worse but non-abusive alternatives. Fund them with the portion of your budget that was previously coerced from you.

Terrestrial fusion achieves very little that using the existing fusion generator we have does not do better.

Evidence that the class of materials is a thing is decently solid so far (but will still take a few months to confirm).

The hard bit of finding a process or another material in the class with a yield of more than a couple of milligram specks per kg of input starts after that.

Plus even then, the anisotropy (it only works in one direction) will give it some odd limitations. Still really cool though